Mom of Covid Teen Puts Covid Oil in the Covid Jeep

My teen daughter and I share our cars. In other words, she drives the Jeep until it runs out of gas, then she drives the eGolf till it runs out of charge. The eGolf is a 2016 model, so despite its battery limitations, most things work. The Jeep is more like the rest of our cars have been. It features something we affectionately call the window snake. When you press the button to lower the driver side window, unless you lower it manually with your hand as you press the button (a tricky maneuver I do not recommend if a police car is close by as you cannot actually have any hands on the steering wheel), a thick coil of wire snakes up in a U shape, accompanied by a terrible grinding sound. You get used to it.

Last night we left home together, me first in the Jeep, her following in the eGolf. As I drove down our road I noticed the Jeep gas light was on and the tank needle at empty. I called her. Did you drive two hundred miles today? I’m sure I put gas in this thing . She laughed. Mom, no. Just turn it off and turn it back on, the gas indicator will go back to normal.

I was feeling good, despite the broken gas gauge, because yesterday I finally put oil in the Jeep. The oil reservoir cap had been stuck for an indeterminate amount of time. The oil light had come on, but then it went off again, so things were ok, right? A while later it came on again, this time with a really insistent beep. I knew this beep said your car is about to die, so I tried taking the cap off again. It was truly stuck. Eventually guilt and fear made me take it into a garage where a very judgie mechanic took it off with his bare hands. He checked the oil. I didn’t ask him to do this because I knew he would need a microscope to see the amount on the dipstick, and he was already looking severe. Why did you not put oil in? he asked, staring at the dipstick. Why did you drive it around like this?

Why did I not put oil in the car? I wanted to say to him through my mask. Because I’m a single mom of a teen with a full time job as a nurse during Covid and I’m trying to pay the rent and the PG&E bill and remember to put the trash out on the right day and I’m afraid of mechanics. 

I couldn’t get the cap off, I said faintly.

There was something else wrong with the car, some electrical fault. The Bluetooth and some of the dash lights flickered off periodically. Then they came back on. Nobody knew why. I had resisted bringing the car in to get this looked at with almost the same tenacity I had resisted the oil top-up. But now I was actually in a garage, with mechanics, people who fixed cars. I asked the judgie guy if they worked on Jeeps. Sure he said, and I felt a flood of relief. This was easy! But when I described  what was wrong, he shook his head. This was an electrical problem and they didn’t fix electrical problems. I would have to take it to the dealer. 

Dealer? What are those? I have only ever bought cars from shifty individuals on craigslist who specialize in selling lemons to morons or, in my more mature recent years, from my Jaguar mechanics when they are ready to sell their loaners. We left the garage in our separate cars, Jessie playing loud music and singing along, me crushed at my inability to take care of basic life issues like car maintenance.

Tonight we drove to a local store for some essential purchases. As I left the car, Jessie reminded me to lock it and I noticed her phone in the coffee holder. When she wasn’t looking, I reached in and slipped it in my bag, then locked the car. This was to teach her a lesson. She likes to leave her phone in the car, so she’s detached from it for a while. I’m all for that, but I think it’s important to emphasize to her, in a responsible mom kind of way, that if someone breaks into our car and steals her phone, I’m not buying her another one. That’s not really annoying is it, to keep emphasizing that? It’s just true. 

We shopped in our masks for our essential items and got back into the car. I was secretly kind of eager for her to notice her phone was not in the coffee holder. I even had a little speech prepared. Your phone’s gone? Oh no! Someone much have broken into the car and stolen it! What are you going to do without a phone till you can afford a new one?

Instead, I noticed that although her phone was gone, she didn’t seem perturbed. In fact, as I reversed the car, she took it out of her bag and started texting on it. Wait, what?! I stopped the car in the middle of the parking lot, my special little speech frozen on my lips and started digging in my bag. Where was her phone? I could only find mine! It turned out that must have been my own phone I took from the coffee holder. She already had hers. I put the car in reverse again and as I left the parking lot, I told her about the lesson I had been ready to teach her. She gave a little laugh. Mom. This kind of thing happens to me a lot.

When we got home, I put all the groceries in the fridge without wiping them down. Then I didn’t wipe down my reusable bags either, because reusable bags are now okay again in some grocery stores (though not in others, because Covid sticks to them some places but not everywhere) and I washed my hands for twenty seconds but I didn’t sing happy birthday because fuck that, and then I laid on my couch reading my book and wondering if I should have saniwiped down my credit card and wallet and car keys like I used to but I sort don’t any more because that was then and this, I think, or at least I sort of assume, is now.

Then I decided to clean out my car because my car is, as always, a shame-spiral inducing hot mess. It’s not a moldy food sort of mess, just stuff I haven’t attended to for a while. And since this is Covid-19 novel coronavirus pandemic shitshow fucked up entire universe reality, the mess in my car consisted of a) unused nitrile gloves that fell on the floor so I don’t feel comfortable using them b) empty SaniWipe packs, c) empty cardboard boxes of nitrile gloves and d) a broken sturdy reusable faceshield.

I loved my sturdy reusable faceshield. It was given to me in the early days of the pandemic when I first starting visiting patients with the virus. It was made by friends of our Chief Medical Officer at UCSF and I always felt that the word sturdy epitomized safety in a way that no number of happy birthdays really could. It was only stiff plastic and foam with elastic to hold it around my head, but when I went into Covid facilities wearing it, it sort of felt like Darth Vadar protection, like you could hear your own breath, in and out, in and out, you have controlled your fear. But then I slung my heavy nursing bag on top of it in the back seat of my car one too many times and the plastic extensions that held the elastic snapped off. Both in the one day, just as I was about to put it on for a visit. It was an ominous moment in my covid hospice nursing trajectory. It felt like Darth Vadar had just had a massive stroke and was drooling out of the left side of his mouth.

There are clearly many other aspects of life with Covid that I would like to cover here, particularly as I nurse Covid positive patients in the last days and weeks of their lives. So much to say. But life is short, there’s no knowing how long any of us have, particularly now that the Bluetooth and dash lights are flickering off periodically on the Jeep. So I guess the most profound piece of wisdom I have to impart through this whole life-altering never-before-experienced phase of the evolution of the human race is this: don’t keep slinging your nursing bag into the back seat of your car on top of your sturdy faceshield. Those plastic elastic holders really aren’t as strong as you think they are. 

Hospice Nurse Gets Role in Downton Abbey

In Beginners, a favorite movie of mine, Ewan McGregor does some internal monologuing to a montage of old photographs of his parents. This is what the sky looked like in 1955, he intones. This is what kissing looked like. This was fashion. Sometimes I do this for my life now. This is what grocery shopping looks like in April 2020. This is driving on the freeway. This is a meeting.

Yesterday I went to Safeway. The line outside was nice and short. The staff sanitizing the carts and letting shoppers in one by one were jovial, joking around from behind their homemade masks. Inside the store, I followed my list carefully, trying not to take too long. But some shelves were empty and I had to improvise. No jelly today, should I get maple syrup? No chicken thighs. Drumsticks? There was salad where last week there was none. I know that the sobering truth behind these empty shelves is that Covid hit a Safeway packing plant in Tracy very hard. I try to send those workers good healing energy as I shop. Mostly I’m just busy being thankful that there’s any food at all. India. Africa. 

At the checkout, when I finally get to the top of the line, I thank the checker for doing his job. I never did that before Covid. I’ve thanked firemen, street sweepers, office cleaners, and trash collectors for their service, but never grocery store clerks. I’m going to add them to my list going forward. I reckon you can’t thank too many people in this world for the jobs they do.

He tells me he moved back here last year from Australia to help out his parents, who are elderly. We agree on the good timing. I tell him I’m a nurse, and he thanks me, so I let him know I’m a hospice nurse, not an ICU nurse, in case he thinks I’m working 12 hour shifts with folks on ventilators and inadequate PPE. He asks if I have any patients with the virus. I tell him soon. 

Next week, I will get my first Covid positive patients. So I will move from wearing PPE only for visits to facilities where Covid lives, to wearing it when I visit my own patients. 

Now that we have folks with the virus on hospice service, we have a new thing at work to improve our safety. It’s called a Doffing Coach. Specially trained nurses stand outside the Covid positive patients’ homes and make sure the nurse doing the visit puts on and takes off their PPE safely. As silly as my new title is, I quite like the idea of being a Doffing Coach. We have been instructed to be assertive. I thought I would step out of some grand vehicle wearing a swirling black cape and top hat. Gloves first! I would thunder at my coworker nurse in their PPE. Drop the faceshield in the bag by its elastic. Drop it!

I did my first Doffing Coach visit. Strangely, there was no cape. I waited obediently outside and eventually my teammate came out from her visit in her stylish yellow paper gown, gloves, N95 respirator and plastic face shield. She had prepared her area beforehand for taking her PPE off. There was a table spread out with hand sanitizer, sanitizing wipes, and a plastic bag for her contaminated gear. She moved very slowly, thinking each move out before she made it.

I watched intently as she took her PPE off. My teammate has been working in healthcare since she was a teen and a nurse for half a century. She started in the operating theater, so sterile procedure is in her DNA. We’ve been given a few different ways we can doff the gear. Whatever she’s doing: that’s what I’m going to do.

After the visit, we stood six feet apart in the parking lot and had a fantastic gossip session. It’s the little things you miss. Not much gossip goes down during Zoom meetings except in the chat window.

The next day I had to go into my office for my annual N95 respirator fit test. Every year this is a chore we have to perform. You gather with a group of coworkers in a conference room at the office and an outside company fits us with N95 masks. This involves a bunch of weird stuff that you would not want to catch sight of through a window. We stand in a circle with our N95s on and giant white plastic hoods over our heads. The outside company person goes around the circle and sprays a bitter tasting spray through a small hole in our hoods. We are instructed to do some relatively simple and yet strange things: move our heads from side to side, bend over and stand up straight numerous times, count to thirty. Bottom line: if you taste the spray, your mask is not sealed properly and you fail the test. Takes about an hour. Lots of paperwork.

Of course, this whole weird and tedious deal is to help save our lives. Everyone knows that. We just usually grumble about having to do it every year. But this year? PARTEEEEEEE!!!! Twenty of us got to be together, six feet apart, in our large conference room. The chatter was intense. None of us had seen each other for six weeks. Then we got to stand shoulder to shoulder in the circle because of course we had our N95 masks on. Just that shoulder to shoulder contact with a bunch of non family members was exotic.

The following day I had to don PPE to do a covid test. As well trained as I am, it was my first nasopharyngeal swab for the Novel Coronavirus 19 and that gown and mask felt awfully hot. My patient joked around with me as he always does. We told each other how great it was to see each other in person after more than a month, even though I was dressed like an astronaut. I asked him if he was scared he has the virus. He shook his head. My Doffing Coach was waiting outside the house for me in her Toyota. She was not wearing a cape. Spoiler alert for the next season of Downton Abbey: the test came back negative. 

Hospice Nurse Shops for Free Cloth Face Mask

It’s shelter-in-place Day #9867403. It’s also the week after Easter. Amazingly, the Easter Bunny made it to our patio in these challenging times. There were some colored eggs and some little baggies of jelly beans in rather obvious place. There are unconfirmed reports that Easter Bunny was wearing a bathrobe and did not mobilize till after 8am, but really, who’s judging?

The recipient of the little gauze bags was delighted that Easter was still alive and well during the global pandemic. I told her that even though she’s 18 now, there will be an egg hunt for her until she is hiding eggs for her own kids. This may not strictly be true, but Easter Bunny got to eat a few handfuls of jellybeans before and during the whole hunt thing, so there is some investment in keeping up the tradition. I won’t even mention the Cadbury’s cream eggs. They never actually made it to the baggies. So relieved another candy-fest is behind us.

Easter being somewhat muted by having to stick-in-the-mud, we decided to console ourselves with a little online shopping. Mom, said teen excitedly, glued to the Urban Outfitters website, I have $1064 of clothes in my shopping cart! I told her this was wonderful news, and she could have them all, as long as she started college a month later than everyone else. Of course, it’s anyone’s guess whether college is even going to happen in August. So that one went down like a lead balloon.

This Wednesday, April 15th, was a big day for me. Not because it was tax day, because it strangely wasn’t. Ha! But I got to drive to my office and pick up my PPE. People on the internet are dressing up to go to their mailbox, or bring the trash out. Imagine the excitement of going into the office! I nearly put on lipstick, but I don’t have any. Instead, I put on a face mask and sanitized my hands. I also made sure I was wearing pants. If you’ve been in any Zoom meetings lately, you’ll know what I’m talking about. 

I let myself in through the locked front door of my office building with my special badge that makes the door k-chunk open in a satisfying bank-robbery kind of way. Then I walked through some weirdly propped open doors to the PPE room. My office, usually humming with activity, was eerily empty and quiet. A table blocked the door of the conference room where once a week my team used to sit around a big table and have our friendly team meetings. I stood a respectful six feet from the person giving out the baggies of PPE from behind the table. My baggie had a gown and mask in it, and a superfine washable face shield (new this week). I was also permitted to select a home-made cloth mask made by kind volunteers. It took me a while to choose which pattern I wanted. Don’t rush me, I wanted to say to the volunteer in case she was judging me for my indecision over a free face mask. I’m shopping here.

Then I went back out to my car, sanitized my hands and everything else I could see, including the entire parking lot, and drove home. The week’s been a bit downhill from there.

Thursday I spent from 9am to 1pm sitting on my kitchen chair in Zoom meetings. I also ate a lot of cinnamon raisin toast. Some of it was for breakfast, but some of it, interestingly, was for lunch. The second Zoom meeting, a presentation by a UCSF doc in how to provide telehealth, had 85 participants. Zoom was experiencing a few glitches in its muting capabilities. The host muted us all, but we could still hear one of the participants ordering a burrito to go. She did not need a straw with her beverage. 

You might be wondering how a hospice nurse can do her job effectively during shelter-in-place. If you find out, please let me know. I cannot see most of my patients in person. I cannot touch them, or hug them, listen to their lungs with my stethoscope, or check their skin for bedsores. I can’t put my hand on their arm to reassure them. I cannot lay my hand on their febrile brows. And I can’t sit with their families while they cry and laugh and tell stories and grieve. It is starting to feel like negligence, this socially distanced nursing, but it’s what we must do. I have to remind myself: would it be better to go see someone and maybe bring them coronavirus?

Today, I had to visit one of my patients in person. In-person nurse visits now have to be approved by my team leader. My patient is dying. For the entirety of this week, she has been exhibiting clear signs. She can’t swallow any more, she doesn’t want food, she closes her mouth against her medications, she’s sleeping most of the time, and today, she was breathing heavily. I texted my team leader: my patient seems to be dying, it feels like gross negligence on my part not to visit her, can I go? I gave some objective data, besides my subjective plea, and she said yes, by all means go.

I drove to the facility. Highway 101 was pretty empty, and so were the surface streets, apart from a marked increase in hazardous drivers. I like to think of it as coronarage. Young probably male drivers, stuck at home for weeks, suddenly let loose on the roads. Possibly with high levels of blood alcohol and illicit drugs. I’m not joking about this. The amount of reckless weaving on 101 today was shocking.

I made it to the facility where my patient lies dying. I put on my PPE in my car in the parking lot, including my trendy new clear plastic face shield. Frankly, I felt like I was about to board Apollo 13. Inside the facility, I had my temperature checked and the usual coronavirus screening questions asked, although today they were a little less rigorous. I did not have to explicitly deny having travelled to China in the past 14 days. The receptionist used her key to let me into the stairwell and I was on my way.

Let me just mention at this point that as soon as you put on an N95 respirator mask, your nose develops an irresistible itch.

At the top of the stairs I rang a bell and soon a medtech came to let me in the locked door to the second floor. There were signs everywhere saying full PPE needed to be worn, but the medtech was wearing only a mask. I assessed my patient. She was doing fine, considering. I went to the medtech station to chart, educated the medtech on when she should call hospice, and checked that all the right medications were present.

I was bumbling around in full PPE, rustling when I walked, my breath noisy, all a bit Darth Vader. The medtech was not even wearing a mask. I advised her to wear one. She said it made her feel claustrophobic, so she only wore it outside the medtech room.

Because, you know, Covid-19 doesn’t really like that room. It only likes outside that room.

When I got home, I left all my clothing and shoes in a plastic bag in the carport and nimbly darted into the house in some clothing that could not have come in contact with the covid 19 virus. Since everyone is sheltering at home, no neighbors witnessed this scene. I’m hoping.

Tomorrow is not a work day and I don’t have to dress up as Darth Vadar, so naturally I plan to climb a staircase with 187 stairs fifty times. See previous blog post. I just don’t have what it takes to explain this sentence. I like to tell people that the stair climbing is keeping me sane but actually tonight I wonder if I have that ass backwards. For the past few days, I’ve been making very poor headway in my training schedule for the whole stair climbing challenge thing. I was only able to climb the staircase 5 or 6 times and those were primarily propelled by annoyance. Trudging would be a good way to describe my climbing style. Quite a bit of muttering was involved.

However, I signed up for this thing and I’m going to try and see it through. My left knee hurts, and it being Friday, happy hour was a lot more prolonged than it probably should have been. I’m really looking forward to an inspiring speech by Bill McKibben at 8am tomorrow, encouraging us Climate Risers to get out there and promote change in the world. And if this means I do two staircases and then have to collapse in a heap, at least I will do it in a trendy looking cloth face mask. Maybe I’ll even wear my Darth Vadar face shield. Just for the sound effects.

Riding Fool Climbs One Gajillion Stairs During Global Pandemic

We riding fools cannot do our Climate Rides this year. I can’t even really ride my road bike right now. I mean, I could. It would be a great stress release, riding solo, in my face mask, on local roads. It’s just that when you ride a road bike there’s a first time for everything, and I have never yet gone over the handlebars. I keep imagining turning up in the ER during a global pandemic with a road-bike concussion. 

But the Climate Ride folks are endlessly resourceful, and they have come up with a shelter-in-place alternative for this year’s cancelled rides. It’s called Climate Rise, and it encourages us road bikers to sign up for some personal or team challenge that we can do at or close to home on a designated day. The day is Saturday April 18th. Examples of personal challenges are: writing 37 poems, baking bread for the first time, and climbing 18,700 stairs.

I include that last one as an example of just how bonkers humans can get when they are forced to #staythefuckhome. But also because I personally know the person who’s going to attempt it. Ok, I’ll just come out and say it. It’s me.

I loved the idea of a Climate Rise challenge. It would be inspiring to me, I figured, and also hopefully to some other people. I didn’t want to fundraise, we’re all strapped enough for cash at this time, but I wanted to do something that might keep climate change in people’s minds while also connecting us somehow in this time of separation and fear. I just couldn’t decide what my challenge would be.

As the social distancing restrictions tightened and we were constrained to staying closer and closer to home, it came to me. Right outside my front door is a staircase with 187 stairs. What if I climbed up and down this staircase some number of times on April 18th? 

One day I went out and climbed the staircase three times. It took me ten minutes and I was pretty winded. The next day my calves really hurt. So the day after that I tried it five times. 

When you are unable to go to the gym, hang out on the beach, ride your bike up a glorious mountain, or even drive to some local trailhead for fear of people who live next to that trailhead yelling at you (this has happened to me), you have to get creative. When you are climbing the walls from being indoors so much, you get a bit punchy. I decided a hundred times sounded good to me. So I signed up for Climate Rise and I started to train. 

When I am training for a Climate Ride, I ramp up slowly over several months on a carefully planned schedule. My training coach is a very inspirational friend of mine. She is a triathlete and she takes no prisoners. This is how conversations with her go on a 50-mile ride on a Sunday morning:

Her: We don’t need to stop at Olema for coffee, right? We can power on to Marshall?

Me: Ummmm

Her: Great! That’s how I feel too! Marshall!

However, training to climb 18,700 stairs during a global pandemic when I’m also still working full-time as a nurse is proving to be a little less scheduled and, let’s just say, kind of spotty.

One day recently I did the staircase seven times. The next day, six. I was sort of tired that day, but also happy hour came around before I had a chance to do my stairs. It was completely beyond my powers to prevent it. A word to anyone out there wanting to climb 1870 stairs: don’t have a glass of wine first. 

I have a great playlist that I have put together to keep me engaged as I trot up and down the staircase. It’s called Born Slippy after my all-time favorite workout song by Underworld. There are songs of different speeds on my Born Slippy playlist, because in the beginning you want to run up and down the stairs, but after a while you just want to sort of slowly slog. And sometimes, when it is getting a bit weird to be climbing the same staircase yet again, you want to get fancy: take steps two at a time, skip down, use a new rhythm that matches the song. Exciting stuff!

I feel lucky because as a hospice nurse, not only am I still fully employed but I get to drive around a bit. I’m not the kind of person who would do well being stuck in the house all the time. So despite the risks inherent in visiting patients, I’m thankful that several times a week, these visits are essential for hands-on care and I get to beetle up and down 101 with no trouble at all. It’s like a good dream, driving 101 during the pandemic. And then I come home and I get to climb a staircase eight times! I mean, what more could anyone want?!

You will not be surprised to hear that it becomes a little meditative, hoofing it up and down those stairs. I have deep thoughts. I can’t really remember what they are now. It occurred to me I could record them on my iPhone, but then I was afraid it might be like when you get really stoned and the next morning you read over your penetrating wisdom from the night before.

I do remember thinking this evening, at about stair twelve hundred, that my activity was a little like a metaphor for life: it’s a lot easier to go down than it is to climb up. Deep, no? I’ve also been soaking up the wisteria vine that hangs over much of the top half of the staircase. Every day, a little more in bloom, a little more fragrant. I think about how people in India can see the Himalayas for the first time in decades as the lockdown eases air pollution. Shoals of tiny fish are visible in Venice canals. Nature is taking back some of what we stole. 

In celebration of this momentous shift, of humanity’s epic fight against a microbe, of the kindness and humor and generosity and heroism that have blossomed during the pandemic, and of my own hopeless optimism, I’m climbing stairs. I don’t really know what else to do with myself.

At 8am on April 18th, Bill McKibben is going to virtually address us Climate Risers before we head into our challenges. After his talk, I will go outside and face my demon staircase. I honestly don’t know if I can do it. I’ve only climbed eight so far, and it’s a week before. Whether I make it to a hundred or not, I really hope I don’t trip and break a bone. Imagine turning up in the ER during Covid-19 because you were running down a staircase to the rhythm of Born Slippy.

Hospice Nurse Eats Half Her Weight in Ice-Cream

It’s April 2020. I haven’t blogged since late September. That was then. This is now.

I am sitting on the sofa and rain is beating down on the skylight. I am eating ice-cream from a mug with a knife. The ice-cream has raisins and honey in it, because these are things I found in the kitchen, and I haven’t been to the grocery store in a while. The knife? No clean spoons. Life has been very surreal recently, with the pandemic and all, but really, how much stranger did it have to become?

I am a hospice nurse, so every day at work I meet people who have been told they have six months or less to live. I long ago gave up trying to imagine what this must feel like. I just hope in my every interaction with these people to be kind and gentle, not to say anything too thoughtless. Keeping in the forefront of my mind their tenuous relationship with the future can be exhausting. Imagine what it must be like for them.

I have been present when my patients took the Aid in Dying medications, legally ending their lives in the presence of friends and family. You don’t walk out of those visits feeling that the world is anything but surreal.

Early 2020, along comes Covid-19. Nobody has any immunity to it. Kind of like death in general, like the entire human race just qualified for hospice. But now, everyone’s buying up zinc lozenges and rigatoni and toilet paper. My hospice patients never panic buy dry goods. I guess they know better.

People keep asking me whether I am safe doing my work during the pandemic. The short answer is, I wish I knew. But I think you can say the same of anyone who sets foot in a grocery store right now. Working in healthcare has its own specific set of risks, of course. And I know the two questions they are really asking: Are you nursing people with the virus? Do you have enough protective gear at hospice? Same answer: I wish I knew. 

My hospice has its store of gloves, gowns, and masks with face shields. We nurses all have at least one N95 mask in our car stock. There are solid plans in place to keep us supplied with protective gear as needed. The problem is, nobody knows how much that will be. Every Thursday, we have to let our supervisor know our projected PPE needs for the next week. On Monday afternoons, we drop by the office and pick up our allotment in a baggie with our name on it. A volunteer gives them out. Last week, my baggie had a pink paper cutout heart in it too. 

We are only making essential in-person nursing visits. You know, for hands-on things like wound care, critical end of life symptom management, and lots of bowel stuff you really don’t want me to describe in any sort of detail.

Every day I don’t have to put on a blue gown and N95 with face shield is a good day. I mean, it’s just really hard to look cool in those plastic gowns. I’m pondering this fashion dilemma as I get a new tub of Ben & Jerry’s from the freezer. To be fair, the first tub only had a few spoonfuls left. It’s not that I’m bingeing on ice-cream. But why do they have to put a crackly plastic seal that you need a sharp knife to open because you can never find the perforations? I’m jabbing at the seal with a knife and I’m imagining how fun it would be to have to go to the ER during a global pandemic with a Ben & Jerry-related knife injury.

It would not be fun. But it would be no less fun than breathing fiberglass. I say this because of the homemade face mask thing. The CDC vacillated for weeks over whether cloth masks for the general population were a good idea, even though South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had already clearly demonstrated that they were. Finally they said ok, yes, sew yourselves some t-shirt masks. 

Meanwhile, somebody figured out that HEPA vacuum cleaner bags filter out 97% of particles, so they’d be a great thing to stick inside your homemade t-shirt masks, no? No! Because after I did this, and breathed a couple days’ worth of air through my homemade masks, somebody else noticed that HEPA vacuum cleaner bags are made of fiberglass. So now, even if I survive Coronavirus, I’ve been breathing fiberglass for two days.

There’s just not enough ice-cream to go round right now.

On the upside, I’m seeing a whole lot more of my teen during ‘the Covid’ as the Irish are calling it. This is a good thing, even if the stress of a global pandemic has made her just a tiny bit more spacy than usual. I came home the other day from work and our front door was wide open. Teen was not home. I texted her. How long had our front door been wide open with nobody home? She could not say. A couple of days later, I come home from work to find the front door closed but with the key in it. I text her. Progress! Her response: Leaving the door open is really safe cos robbers will just assume you’re home. If you close your door but don’t lock it they’ll be like, stupid people, I’m gonna steal their stuff.

I’m not sure where the door with a key in falls on this spectrum. But I am loving on the more time with my teen thing. I did have to show her one day where my red folder of Important Papers In Case Mom Dies is in the basement. That was a special moment. We had a chat about it. During our chat, it was established that she would prefer if I didn’t die. Oddly, I feel the same way about her. I’m guessing these special chats are happening all over the planet right now. Sort of makes me feel like having a little ice-cream.

Single Mom Gets New Roommate

In a single week this June, my daughter turned 18 and graduated high school. Now it’s September and the kids are shouldering their backpacks and sharpening their pencils, but in our house it’s still Summer Vacation. There are Back to School signs in the store windows, but instead of settling my girl into a tiny dorm room somewhere halfway across the country, I have a new roommate. In certain key ways, she’s very like my old roommate. Except she’s an adult! This is exciting!

She’s taking a gap year - a phenomenon that only seems to have sprung into existence in the last ten years. When I finished high school, it was called Not Going to College Yet. She launched into her year of adventure with a six-week backpacking trip around Europe and Morocco with her boyfriend. Now she is home and she is my new roommate.

It occurred to me shortly after her return from Europe that I was no longer the parent of a child and it was thus no longer my responsibility to keep the fridge stocked at all times with tasty, nutritious, affordable food. If you have read any of my former posts, you will know that I’ve never been any good at this anyway. But now it turns out I don’t have to be. Because I share my house with my adult daughter and she has a car and she knows where United Markets is!

There are other advantages to sharing my house with my adult child, if that is not a contradiction in terms. These are as follows: I don’t have to do laundry or clean or wash dishes. Because my roommate will be doing all of this. Soon. 

The other day, my new roommate informed me that our sheets smelled bad, and this was because I had left them in the washer too long. I tried explaining that I had not been home when the wash cycle finished, but this did not stand up in court. Apparently, I should not do laundry unless I am going to be home for the entirety of both cycles. Who knew?!

However, the problem of poor smelling sheets will soon be solved, because NR will be doing the laundry. I’m excited.

I threw a dinner party the other night. It was a complex meal, one that I love to make for dinner parties because it is very tasty (Irish cooking has two secrets to its success: butter and cream) but it sure uses a lot of dishes. Late that night when the guests left, the whole kitchen was hidden beneath piles of dirty dishes. Three days later this was still the case. I know, that’s really bad housekeeping and irresponsible and could invite cockroaches into our home. The only reason I am admitting to it is to explain that my new roommate’s powers of observation seem a bit sub-par. Of course, they were my dirty dishes and I should have washed them. But I was busy. And my roommate seemed just fine with living without a kitchen for a few days. The existing dirty dishes were added to by bowls of half-eaten cereal. I am not sure how this will play out.

The fridge also remained unchanged for a while. At first glance, it looked pretty full, but as my new roommate loves to point out, when our fridge is full its fullness consists mostly of a) condiments, b) bread in various stages of decay and c) cheese. This is because I love to cook elaborate meals for dinner parties but when I’m alone I like to dine on cheese sandwiches. It’s not that I’m lazy. Good grief. Just that by the time I notice I am hungry, I am way too hungry to endure the preparation time for a healthy nutritious meal. I must eat, immediately, and thus l make a cheese sandwich.

The other day NR informed me that she wished to go grocery shopping. I showered cash on her immediately. That night the fridge was full of tasty nutritious food. It felt great. Then both of us weren’t home much for a few days because we are busy and important. Some of the food went off. I threw it out, feeling terrible. Then our fridge was full mainly of condiments and the ingredients for cheese sandwiches.

I’m not saying anything. Really, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut. This is me, shutting up about it. As my eldest brother once ruefully commented on the subject of parenting, saying I told you so just isn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. Plus the local Home Goods just reopened, after a 9-month closure following its roof falling in. We have decided we are going shopping for new bedding in order to solve the laundry problem at least for a few weeks. Turns out my new roommate thinks just like I do. I believe this is going to work!

Single Mom. Teen Daughter. Very Old Shoes. Ice Cubes.

Those things in the title may not seem like they have a whole lot of cohesion, as blog post titles go, apart from the fact that my teen daughter is clearly related to me by birth, I possess some very old shoes, and I sometimes manage to have ice cubes in my freezer for the formation of iced drinks as well as the healing of inflammatory injuries of the body. 

Actually, all four things have a sort of subtle relation to one another in terms of the fact that lately I have been feeling my age. My age is 52, and the sole reason I am feeling it, apart from insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym, is that I injured myself biking and it’s taking longer than anticipated to heal.

If you have read previous blog posts, you may have noticed that I rode 300 miles in early July to raise money for climate action. To keep things short, for those who did not read my ten thousand page post, I did an independent challenge Climate Ride and pedaled my road bike out my door, up to Mendocino, and back over four days to raise awareness of the perilous future facing our planet. The ride was epic, I had a fantastic time, and after I came home I discovered I could not really walk or even just lie down without pain.

For a while after the ride, I thought I had just stressed my body beyond the limits of normal endurance. It would soon go away, the pain, would it not? After all, I had done a 320-mile climate ride a year before without any bodily injury so I naturally assumed I could just keep doing these crazy things with no repercussions. I was, I confess, annoyed that my body had not fully cooperated with the insane task I had set it. Had I not trained for months? Was I not near peak fitness when I rode out my door? So why were there unidentified shooting pains all down both legs to my feet?

When the pain persisted for more than a week, I sprang into the kind of action that all nurses take when they are injured. I did nothing at all, soldiered on with daily life, and continued to hope it would all just go away. 

When this approach failed to work, I spent a few weeks not riding my bike (sensible) or doing much at the gym (also sensible) and failing to seek medical attention (not so sensible). Eventually, after an undisclosed amount of time and several trial bike rides that resulted in renewed pain, I made an appointment with Ron Solari.

Ron is a chiropractor and a healer of indescribable talent. As soon as I explained my issue to him, he knew a) exactly what was wrong, b) how to fix it, and c) when I could be back on my bike. And he was right. And this is why everyone who knows him, and all of you who do not yet know him, love Ron Solari.

Ron told me to do 20 pelvic tilts twice a day and a stretch he calls Number Four. If I were a yoga practitioner, Number Four might present me with no big issue, but as you may already know I’m not a yoga practitioner, nor do I stretch before or even after my epic bike rides, which may have something to do with why I got impacted vertebrae at the base of my spine after riding to Mendocino and back. Three hundred miles in four days: crazy. Not stretching before, after, or during: very crazy.

Now I have spent a week doing pelvic tilts BID (that’s nursing speak for twice a day, just thought I’d throw it in to give myself a shred of validity in the face of my gross failure to take care of the temple of my body) and the painful Number Four stretch. And Ron has adjusted my misaligned and impacted spine twice. And I really think I’m going to be ok. Tomorrow, I’m getting up at 6:15 and I’m going for a bike ride at 6:30. I cannot wait to tell you how pain free I will be afterwards. Do not go away.

The shoe thing: I’m going to skip over it to the ice cube thing because that is more related to Ron Solari and the age-related rubbishy nature of my body. As I left his office this afternoon, I remembered to mention to him that I also have acute tendonitis in my right elbow. I remembered to mention this to him at the very tail end of my treatment for vertebral compression, because it is so painful I can no longer lift my coffee cup without wincing. Ron asked whether I thought it was related to my bike riding? Or my job? Do you lift patients, he asked solicitously? I admitted that I was no longer able to lift a piece of paper without pain. Oh, he said knowingly yet completely without judgement, you’re there.

Long story short, and skipping over the part where you judge me because I’m lousy at self care and allow my body to become seriously debilitated before I consider it worth mentioning to a health professional, Ron’s immediate advice was succinct and focussed. Every night, he said with the intensity he reserves for his treatment instructions, I want you to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. That will be long enough. Then, he continued, not letting up with the intensity, I want you to do these two exercises. He showed me the exercises. I committed them to memory, along with the ice cube instructions. My elbow has been hurting with gradually increasing hurtingness for months. Maybe a year. I knew that in two minutes, I was receiving the verbal cure. I was to do this for three days, Ron said, and then return to him for an ultrasound.

I left his office, after paying his ridiculously paltry fee, only just managing not to bow down to the ground to pay homage to him. He’d hate that. He just likes to fix people. 

Turns out it’s really difficult to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. I imagined, what, a minute? Two? It’s longer than that, but it still shouldn’t really be that difficult. Unless you are someone like me who can’t just sit on the couch holding an ice cube against their elbow without a) emailing someone, b) changing the Spotify playlist, c) doing sit-ups or d) dusting the ceiling free of the spider webs noted while doing sit-ups. 

I held that ice cube against my swollen tendonitis-ridden elbow until it melted. But I dropped it a lot. It slipped out of my grasp while I was groping in the fridge for a La Croix. And it slid away from me while I texted with Jessie about her etsy store. It even went under the kitchen table as I was taking my bike out of the basement to prep for my ride at 6:30 tomorrow morning. Damn slippery little piece of ice, couldn’t you just melt already?

The shoe thing. If you aren’t convinced that I’m feeling my age from the compacted vertebrae or the tendonitis or the slippery ice cube, get this: I was walking downtown the other day to pick up the Jeep keys from Jessie. She was working at the Potting Shed, and a block away from there, I had the thought that the shoes I had chosen to wear were not only really old but had also never actually been comfortable. They looked good though, to me, and you know how that goes.

As I had that thought, the sole came completely off one of them. Just like when you get a flat tire on the freeway, it took me a couple of steps to realize that what felt really weird about my shoe was actually the fact that the sole had completely separated from the upper part and was flapping ridiculously. I took my shoes off so I could walk the block to the Potting Shed. It was Fairfax. A woman walking barefoot doesn’t exactly raise eyebrows.

When I got to her workplace, I told Jessie and her coworker about my shoe and we fell about laughing. I was laughing because of how I felt like a country and western song on legs. Turned out Jessie was laughing because it was so typical of stuff that would happen to her mom. Really? I am not sure why her coworker was laughing. But the belly laugh on a hot afternoon did us all good. And her industrious coworker glue-gunned the sole back on my shoe. 

Now I have perfectly serviceable shoes. I have a spine that is aligned and no longer features compacted vertebrae. And my chronic tendonitis is well on the way to being healed. I am a reasonably functional mother of a teen. And although I am fifty two years old, I only have insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym. So I figure I’m doing pretty good, considering.